Cookbook challenges taboo

Any author has to deal with bad reviews, but how about the wrath of God?

Dr. Eli Landau has written “The White Book,” touted as the first Israeli pork cookbook.

With 80 mainly Mediterranean recipes and Eastern European dishes, “The White Book” tries to reveal the secrets of the pig for cooks who have never prepared it nor perhaps even tasted it.

Since the mid-1950s, Israel has had laws restricting the sale of pork and banning its farm production in deference to biblical proscriptions. But because of legal loopholes, it was possible to raise pigs for science or in areas considered Christian. Pork buyers included secular Jews, Christian Arabs and more recently, immigrant workers and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who don’t keep kosher.

Even more than other non-kosher foods, pork is seen by many Israelis as an affront to Jewish nationalism. Pork sellers routinely face protesters, and in recent years, arsonists have attacked shops in cities like Netanya and Safed, where Orthodox Jews live near secular immigrant communities.

Landau, a 61-year-old retired cardiologist and food writer from Tel Aviv, likes pork and thinks there are many Israelis who shy from it not so much because it’s taboo, but because they don’t know how to prepare it.

“People are reluctant to cook pork at home,” said Landau, who is not an observant Jew. “I want to make it easier for chefs and personal cooks to bring it home and to the menus. If that happens, I’ll be more than happy.”

Rabbi Shimon Felix, an Orthodox rabbi and religious educator in Jerusalem, said he thought Landau’s intent was “let’s stick it to the religious tradition.”

“There’s something childish to being so naughty,” the rabbi said. “It’s more mature and adult to look at this as an ancient tradition.”

As a child, Landau said, he developed a taste for pork when his family was given some by a kosher butcher.

Landau said that his mother had cared for the butcher when he was a boy in the Lodz ghetto in Poland during World War II. She ate no pork, but she got sausages on the black market to keep him alive. Years later, when the butcher grew up and his benefactor had a boy of her own, he sent her family sausages to remember her kindness.

Landau loved eating that sausage as a child, but he couldn’t find pork in Israeli restaurants as a teenager. Then a grill man told him the secret: order “the white steak,” a common euphemism for pork in Israel, and one of the inspirations for the name of the book.

Landau, a food columnist for Haaretz and the author of three cookbooks with Mediterranean recipes, found the pork of his dreams in Italy, where he studied medicine near Parma and tasted his first real prosciutto.

“Pork meat is to a cook like canvas to a painter,” Landau said. “You can draw on it your own tastes and the meat will accept, unlike lamb or even beef.”

In one of his favourite recipes, for spaghetti with pork loin sauce, “the loin of pork is cooked together with tomatoes – my interpretation to an Italian dish. There’s a chunk of meat with the bone and it’s cooked for a long time, until the meat falls off the bone.”

“What people have in mind is chicken schnitzel,” he said, with a hint of disparagement, about most Israelis. “But they don’t really know schnitzel made of pork, especially this size and thickness, which keeps the juiciness.”

Yuval Ben-Ami, an author and former online food critic for Haaretz, said the recipes in the book were contemporary. “It can compete with pork cookbooks or pork recipes from countries that are not pork-deprived,” he said.

At Yoezer, a high-end restaurant in Jaffa, the chef Itzik Cohen has held dinners for as many as 90 customers exclusively with the book’s pork recipes.